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China is truly a unique nation and no-where is this more evident than its nonsensical attitude to pornography.

Yup, since the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, the production, distribution and consumption of any smutty content has been illegal, but why?

If you look at all the countries of the world, the ones which have restrictions on such material 99% of the time do so because of religious reasons – or religion masquerading as morality. Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Iran the list goes on and on for a depressingly long time, with the majority of oppressive regimes located here in Asia.

Then we come to China – a nation where religion is barely tolerated by the Communist Party. Just ask the Falun Gong, a religious sect hounded out of the country as a “heretical organisation”, or the Muslims of Xinjiang Province, who have been told this month that they cannot fast during Ramadan.

The Party’s not keen at all on organised religion yet behaves in a quasi-religious way towards pornography.

Just this week, Chinese police smashed a massive porn site and arrested over 2,000 unlucky punters. Many of them will get let off with a warning but this will mean serious jail time for the site admins.

Ironically, the site, which had been going since 2009, was only discovered after a nosy Mum decided to find out why her son’s high school grades had taken a sudden turn for the worse…

What a colossal waste of everyone’s time. Seriously. Can you imagine the police hours involved in the three-month investigation, which spanned the entire country?

And for what? So the Party can prove once again it is protecting the moral health of the populace?

In reality, it often uses porn – lumped in with internet fraud, gambling and malware – as an excuse to ‘clean up the web’ periodically. The real target in these clean up initiatives is usually political opponents of the Party or just general troublemakers.

Surely the Party is missing a trick here. A wank-happy population with a steady supply of porn is far less likely to rebel against its masters than one deprived, agitated and excluded, seeking out underground forums like the site recently shuttered.

If religion used to be the opiate of the people, then today surely it’s internet porn.

We need to get organised on this people because one day China is going to rule the world, and I for one worry about the future…